La tristesse durera (scream to a sigh)

I realised today why babies and small children openly wail
and scream and cry in public. It’s because they should. We all would and we all
want to. I want to scream and bawl whenever I see someone in the street who I
perceive as being bad at maths. Or short but wearing a suit. Maybe someone
who’s eating a sandwich and a small, wet crumb is stuck to their lower lip, and
they haven’t noticed. Bitter tears could stream down my face if I caught sight
of a man leaving Argos with an item too big for his carrier bag. But why don’t
we? What could be the reason the capacity to outwardly scream in turmoil in
public isn’t carried on into adulthood? Perhaps it’s because our wails of
desperation would give away our location to clipboard charity workers.

Just think of all the things that wouldn’t be possible in
this world if we couldn’t suppress our desire to yell our discontent. We’d have
no libraries, no universities, no air travel and no film. No recorded music, no
literature, no theatre, no cinema and no cafés. So how do we adults vent our
unsatisfied need to scream at the world? We invented the Internet.